Cannot update a query once a slice has been taken

As the error states, you cannot call update() on a QuerySet if you took out a slice.

The reason:

1. Taking a slice is equivalent to a LIMIT statement in SQL.
2. Issuing an update turns your query into an UPDATE statement.

What you are trying to do would be equivalent to

UPDATE ... WHERE ... LIMIT 5

which is not possible, at least not with standard SQL.

The documentation suggests that something like the following might be possible - I'm not sure if doing the limiting in an inner QuerySet bypasses the check around calling update() after slicing:

inner_q = UserLog.objects.filter(user=user,
                                 action='message',
                                 timestamp__lt=now).values('pk')[0:5]
UserLog.objects.filter(pk__in=inner_q).update(read=True)

Failing that, you could use the in field lookup like so:

ids = UserLog.objects.filter(user=user,
                             action='message',
                             timestamp__lt=now).values_list('pk', flat=True)[0:5]
UserLog.objects.filter(pk__in=list(ids)).update(read=True)

Since Django 2.2 you can use bulk updates :

queryset = UserLog.objects.filter(user=user).filter(action='message').filter(timestamp__lt=now)
bulk = []
for userlog in queryset[0:5]:
    userlog.read = True
    bulk.append(userlog)
UserLog.objects.bulk_update(bulk,['read'])

I was getting the same error when attempting to limit the number of records returned by a queryset.

I found that if we're using one of Django's class-based generic views such as the ArchiveIndexView, we can use the paginate_by = attribute to limit the number of records.

For example (in views.py):

from django.views.generic import ArchiveIndexView
from .models import Entry

class HomeListView(ArchiveIndexView):
    """ Blog Homepage """
    model = Entry
    date_field = 'pub_date' 
    template_name = 'appname/home.html'
    queryset = Entry.objects.filter(
        is_active=True).order_by('-pub_date', 'title')
    paginate_by = 30